Constitutional reform: a mouse that may roar

New Labour's constitutional reforms have lacked the incisiveness of Oliver Cromwell's restless search for durable modernisation. But they share one feature with the lord protector's republican model: not knowing where they were going, ministers have gone further than they realised in shaking up the system.

A prime example of unintended consequences is the Freedom of Information Act. First promised by Labour in 1978 ("we'll pass it if you don't desert us," ministers promised the Liberals as Jim Callaghan fell), the initial Blairites' draft excluded parliament from FoI until Tony Wright's public administration committee protested.

Long-term results? Enormous, including the MPs' expenses scandal, which incidentally derailed Gordon Brown's decentralising agenda for the "governance of Britain". This week Jack Straw produced what University College London's constitution unit calls a mouse of a bill. Only two of Brown's 12 priorities in 2007 have been included, according to the shadow justice secretary, Dominic Grieve: appointments to quangos and bishoprics.

Straw's unheroic mouse is still worth having. It will allow peers to retire or be fired for misconduct and end the hereditary principle by stopping the 92 (mostly Tory) survivors electing a replacement when one dies. It also puts the civil service code, Whitehall's core values, on a statutory footing, protecting it from political interference. That too is an old controversy.

Odds and sods clauses designed to enhance accountability will allow unregulated demos to resume in Parliament Square and remove the PM's role in appointing judges to the supreme court, which opened for business across the square on 1 October.

The final separation of law lords from the legislature – first mooted by Gladstone in 1873 – is another bit of tidying up with huge, unpredictable potential for judicial review of the executive. On Tuesday the lord chief justice held a pressconference, a high-profile strategy.

The change is typical of patchwork constitutional reform since 1689 when an exhausted country settled for a flexible model. It has been tweaked ever since in response to events and agitation, most famously the Chartists.There is even talk (not in Straw's bill) of outside experts becoming ministers as "temporary peers".

Apart from FoI and Lords reform (more done than for 100 years, but now stalled), devolution and the Human Rights Act were Labour's other big modernisations. Where will either end up? The Tories threaten to repeal the HRA and, in Scotland last weekend, Alex Salmond rattled his sabre for an independence referendum in 2010. The SNP first minister knows he would lose if Holyrood's non-SNP majority let him have one (it won't). Both sides are bluffing for high stakes.

Family and gender-friendly Commons reforms have been piecemeal too, significant only if backbenchers really want to overrule the executive, which is difficult and therefore doubtful. This week's row over MPs unprecedented rejection of Ed Balls's choice of children's commissioner shows what could become the norm. As with much else since 1997, greater openness is the key. It has not brought greater trust.

More radical reform briefly looked possible after the expenses scandal broke, less so now, though a hung parliament may produce PR voting: MPs are less hostile to the Lib Dems' favourite reform. David Cameron is keen to decentralise Britain's over-centralised state (though not his own party's) with populist flourishes such as citizen initiatives. But the Tory leader admits that the economy, not the constitution, would be his priority unless he rashly seeks to unpick the EU's Lisbon treaty.

With hindsight the window may be closing on a decade of changes only disguised as mice, ones which Britons will take decades to digest. Mice can bite.